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“Bull Elk”

Artist Bio

As a composer and performer, Kamala Sankaram has collaborated with a diverse group of artists including the Philip Glass Ensemble (Einstein on the Beach), the Wooster Group (La Didone), and Anthony Braxton (Trillum E.). She has recorded with Anthony Braxton (Trillium E), Phil Kline (Around the World in a Daze: Starkland Records), End (The Sick Generation: Hymen Records), Death Comet Crew (Dominatrix), the Albany Symphony Orchestra and Anti-Social Music. Her compositions have been featured as part of the Bang on a Can Summer Festival, the Santa Fe New Music Festival, the Lucerne Festival, the Music with a View Festival at the Flea Theater, and her work on the show Sounding (directed by Kristin Marting), was hailed as "gorgeous pop-rock interludes" by Time Out New York. In addition to her musical pursuits, Kamala has created voice characters for Comedy Central, the Cartoon Network, and Disney.

Artist Statement

My work has been informed by the fact that I am a singer as well as a composer. Because of this, my music tends to be characterized by an emphasis on melodic line. However, my Indian background has given me an ear that emphasizes modal and non-western harmonies. I’ve always been interested in creating works tailored toward a modern audience. Modern listeners have an altogether different way of hearing. For the first time in history, the average listener has access, not only to the music and art of his or her own culture, but to those of cultures worldwide. Within each of these cultures, you’ll find further subcultures consisting of classical and modern forms. In American culture alone, on a given day you can hear classical music, rock, jazz, hip hop, punk… the list goes on. Each of the genres has different meanings and associations for the listener. It’s commonly understood that musical meaning comes from a sense of expectation. When we hear a piece of tonal music, we expect that the harmony will resolve to the tonic chord. Composers use this expectation to create musical emotion by delaying that resolution with travels to distant chords. For the modern audience, expectation can also be created by musical genre. Specifically, the rise of film and television soundtracks have changed the relationship between visual and musical elements. The modern audience has a repertoire of “musicovisual” associations. For example, if you play the average listener a series of screeching violin glissandi accompanied by the image of a blond coed stumbling through a dark forest, they’ll expect the appearance of a serial killer. If you hear a twangy guitar and the sound of a lonely whistle, you expect a high plains shoot-out. More specifically, Wagnerian leitmotifs have taken on new life as used in the movie soundtrack. The Imperial March is associated with Darth Vader, the repetition of a minor second is associated with a man-eating shark, and so on. Musical meaning ultimately results from a sense of expectation. I’m interested in taking the expectations created by the associations of genre and turning them on their head to create something totally new.

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